Tuesday, July 15, 2014

GOP ready to tank the economy

Republicans refuse to make a deal to finance the highway trust fund—and if they don’t act by August 1, Congress will have to cut highway and infrastructure by 28 percent, putting 700,000 jobs at risk.

Rev. Al Sharpton discusses with Jared Bernstein and Krystal Ball, co-host of “The Cycle.”

MSNBC's Republican Loving Morning Blow and Chuck Todd Are Losing To The Weather Channel

By Jason Easley


scarborough-todd Things got so bad for MSNBC’s conservative-leaning shows Morning Joe and The Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd that they lost with younger viewers to The Weather Channel last month.

According to TVNewser, “While the show got off to a slow start in March, “AMHQ” has been seeing some bright spots. For the month of June, “AMHQ” topped the 7am-10am hours on MSNBC in the A25-54 demo by +3%. On July 4, “AMHQ” averaged 173,000 total viewers, outranking MSNBC, CNN and HLN.”

Let’s toss out the bad ratings for MSNBC on July 4th, because regular hosts are on vacation and it is significant weather day as most people are outdoors for cookouts and fireworks. It is telling that two hours of Morning Joe and one hour of Chuck Todd’s The Daily Rundown were beaten by the weather in the month of June. It wasn’t the middle of hurricane season so extreme weather events were not dominating the news. The other essential point is that MSNBC didn’t lose to The Weather Channel with older viewers. They lost with people age 25-54. This is the demographic that the Lean Forward network is targeting.
The problem at MSNBC remains that the people running the network continue to give the viewers what they don’t want. MSNBC viewers don’t want to hear three hours of inside the Beltway talk led by a host who sings the praises of the Republican Party.

Chuck Todd’s MSNBC show is more balanced than Scarborough’s, but still features so much Beltway conventional wisdom that is so out of step with the rest of the country that it is easy to see why Todd is not popular with the MSNBC faithful.

MSNBC incorrectly believed that by getting younger hosts they could attract younger viewers. This has not happened. Most of the worst performing shows on MSNBC (Ronan Farrow to name one) are fronted by the younger hosts.

MSNBC loves Joe and Mika. They will never make a change to their morning show unless they are forced to. The network adores them, because they are a mostly steady second-place finisher behind Fox and Friends in the ratings. MSNBC isn’t listening to what their viewers want, but things have reached a whole new level of bad when the network’s centerpiece morning show is losing to The Weather Channel.
MSNBC is capable of doing much better, but it won’t until those who are calling the shots start giving viewers what they really want.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Philly VA benefits center is in stunning disarray


VA´s Philadelphia Regional Office , on Wissahickon Avenue. The VA inspector general said investigators found manipulated claims, duplicate payments. ANDREW THAYER / Staff Photographer
VA's Philadelphia Regional Office , on Wissahickon Avenue. The VA inspector general said investigators found manipulated claims, duplicate payments. ANDREW THAYER / Staff Photographer

By Tricia L. NadolnyInquirer Staff Writer

Inspectors surveying Philadelphia's Veterans Affairs benefits center in June found two stunning signs of disarray: mail bins brimming with claims dating to 2011 and other benefits that had been paid twice.

More alarming, the team from the VA Office of Inspector General found evidence that staff tasked with managing pensions for the eastern United States were manipulating dates to make old claims appear new, according to a report obtained by The Inquirer.

The findings are the first clear evidence that the city's VA system is not immune from controversies that have plagued other centers and sparked a growing scandal over delayed care and services affecting veterans nationwide.

Two whistle-blowers who work at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Regional Office, where the offenses were discovered, described the process the same: "cooking the books."

"They're hiding the real numbers from the people and saying, 'We're catching up to the backlog,' " said Ryan Cease, 31, who has worked at the Germantown facility for about five years. "But they're not. They're just hiding it."

The inspector general's review was released by the House Committee on Veterans Affairs ahead of a Monday night hearing in Washington at which it will be presented.

Separate from the ongoing probe into appointment-setting practices at the VA Medical Center in University City, the report focuses on the VA Regional Office on Wissahickon Avenue, which oversees the administration of benefits to 825,000 veterans in eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware. The site also houses a Pension Management Center, one of three nationwide, that services more than a dozen states and Puerto Rico.

In a statement released jointly, the Philadelphia and national VA offices said they have taken immediate actions to correct the practices in Philadelphia. The national office added that it is conducting on-site reviews at other regional offices where potentially similar issues have been identified.

The Inspector General's Office declined to discuss the review in Philadelphia, saying any public comments will be made at Monday's hearing.

Tip received
The probe at the city's regional office was sparked June 18, when the inspector general received a tip from a whistle-blower, according to the report.

A team visited the site the next day.

There, they found employees were manipulating dates through the misapplication of a May 2013 VA memo that allows claims overlooked in veterans' files to be marked with the date on which they were found, known as the "discovered date."

The clearance - which the VA gave a few months after it laid out an aggressive plan to eliminate its crushing backlog by the end of 2015 - was meant for rare occasions.

But staff at the Philadelphia regional office's Pension Management Center have used the clearance to mark the discovered date on claims that didn't fit the criteria, the inspector general found. The action made claims look as though they were newer than they were, the report said. The inspectors, whose investigation is ongoing, found 30 occurrences on the June visit.

Kristen Ruell, a lawyer and a whistle-blower from the Philadelphia office who is scheduled to testify at Monday's hearing, said the discovered-date loophole is widely used and has been since it was instituted.

She said managers first instructed those processing claims to use the discovered date for claims a year or older. As the 2015 deadline nears, that has changed, and more recently staff members were told to use it on claims as little as six weeks old, she said.

"They basically use this as a free ticket, like the golden ticket, to make their old stuff new," said Ruell, 39, who has worked at the center for about seven years.

When the VA instituted the discovered date in 2013, it said each use had to be accompanied by an explanation and approved by a top administrator, after which notice would be sent to a higher office. In each of the 30 cases found in Philadelphia, explanations were not given. But the center's assistant director still signed off on the change, the report found. Notices were never sent.

In a statement, the VA said the inspector general had discovered "confusion and misapplication" of the policy at the Philadelphia regional office and said that the discovered-date practice has since been suspended nationwide.

Regional offices found to have an unusual number of applications of the policy have been referred to the inspector general for review, and any cases impacted by the lapse will be identified and corrected, the agency said.

Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said any employee found to have "intentionally misused this policy will be held accountable," according to the statement.

Other allegations
The VA Inspector General's Office said its probe also must address other allegations at the Philadelphia regional office. They include:

Staff "cherry picking" easy claims and processing them out of order to inflate performance.

Staff not addressing more than 32,000 electronic inquiries from veterans regarding the status of their claims.

Staff hiding mail.

Staff shredding military and returned mail that couldn't be delivered.

Managers being aware of duplicate payments being made to veterans and directing staff to write off the overpayments.

The agency said the regional office is providing additional guidance and training to address the duplicate payments.

It also said the 68 mail bins of papers dating to 2011 were sorted, and all the documents were found to be associated with completed claims and are now being electronically scanned. The inspector general said the old mail, which included both claims and supporting documents, was of concern because decisions on claims could have been made without all the necessary information.

The VA, in its statement, said the office is also being investigated on allegations that staff members have faced retaliation for speaking with the inspectors.

Ruell said the inspectors visited the site in June after she told a friend and former employee from the center about her concerns, and he notified the inspector general.

It's not the first time Ruell and Cease have gone up against their employer. In 2012, both spoke to the New York Times about finding duplicate records that were leading to duplicate payments.

Ruell said the practice of doctoring claim dates stems from staff being rated on performance through a point system and expected to process claims "perfect and fast."

"It's like a system designed to fail," she said. "So it breeds a lot of issues where people are trying to play tricks to look good for Washington."

As new controversy at the Philadelphia regional office comes to light, details of the ongoing review of the city's VA hospital are still being tightly guarded. The facility, the regional hub for more than 57,000 veterans, and a clinic it runs in Horsham, were flagged to receive added scrutiny in a nationwide VA audit released last month.

That review of 731 sites across the country found some employees have used alternate lists or changed dates to hide delays in service. Administrators at the hospital have said they do not expect willful manipulation of data to be found and suggested faulty bookkeeping might be to blame.



Saturday, July 12, 2014

Detroit TV Reporter in Hot Water on MSNBC

Channel 4 reporter Hank Winchester lies on the poor people of Detroit and Maureen Taylor beats his ass & drops the mic on him.

The World We've Constructed Is Far Beyond George Orwell's Worst Nightmare

By John Pilger

 Orwell's chilling vision of the future in '1984' is happening today in the form of media manipulation and unnecessary wars.

 
The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”
Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned. “What a mindfuck,” said the young woman, lighting up her phone.
As advanced societies are de-politicized, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesied in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device.  Peace is “perpetual war”. “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.
In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith.  “Picasso’s red period,” says an Observer headline, “and why politics don’t make good art.” Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice.  Among the insistent voices of consumer- feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”.
At the National Theater, a new play, Great Britain, satirizes the phone hacking scandal that has seen journalists tried and convicted, including a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Described as a “farce with fangs [that] puts the whole incestuous [media] culture in the dock and subjects it to merciless ridicule”, the play’s targets are the “blessedly funny” characters in Britain’s tabloid press. That is well and good, and so familiar. What of the non-tabloid media that regards itself as reputable and credible, yet serves a parallel role as an arm of state and corporate power, as in the promotion of illegal war?
The Leveson inquiry into phone hacking glimpsed this unmentionable. Tony Blair was giving evidence, complaining to His Lordship about the tabloids’ harassment of his wife, when he was interrupted by a voice from the public gallery. David Lawley-Wakelin, a film-maker, demanded Blair’s arrest and prosecution for war crimes. There was a long pause: the shock of truth. Lord Leveson leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologized to the war criminal. Lawley-Wakelin was prosecuted; Blair went free.
Blair’s enduring accomplices are more respectable than the phone hackers. When the BBC arts presenter, Kirsty Wark, interviewed him on the tenth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, she gifted him a moment he could only dream of; she allowed him to agonize over his “difficult” decision on Iraq rather than call him to account for his epic crime. This evoked the procession of BBC journalists who in 2003 declared that Blair could feel “vindicated”, and the subsequent, “seminal” BBC series, The Blair Years, for which David Aaronovitch was chosen as the writer, presenter and interviewer. A Murdoch retainer who campaigned for military attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria, Aaronovitch fawned expertly.
Since the invasion of Iraq – the exemplar of an act of unprovoked aggression the Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson called “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” — Blair and his mouthpiece and principal accomplice, Alastair Campbell, have been afforded generous space in the Guardian to rehabilitate their reputations. Described as a Labour Party “star”, Campbell has sought the sympathy of readers for his depression and displayed his interests, though not his current assignment as advisor, with Blair, to the Egyptian military tyranny.
As Iraq is dismembered as a consequence of the Blair/Bush invasion, a Guardian headline declares: “Toppling Saddam was right, but we pulled out too soon”. This ran across a prominent article on 13 June by a former Blair functionary, John McTernan, who also served Iraq’s CIA installed dictator Iyad Allawi. In calling for a repeat invasion of a country his former master helped destroy , he made no reference to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, the flight of four million refugees and sectarian turmoil in a nation once proud of its communal tolerance.
“Blair embodies corruption and war,” wrote the radical Guardian columnist Seumas Milne in a spirited piece on 3 July. This is known in the trade as “balance”. The following day, the paper published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the bomber were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This other embodiment of “corruption and war” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered people across the developing world.
In a village in Afghanistan, inhabited by the poorest of the poor, I filmed Orifa, kneeling at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed in the adjacent house. A “precision” 500-pound bomb fell directly on their small mud, stone and straw house, leaving a crater 50 feet wide. Lockheed Martin, the plane’s manufacturer’s, had pride of place in the Guardian’s advertisement.
The former US secretary of state and aspiring president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was recently on the BBC’s Women’s Hour, the quintessence of media respectability. The presenter, Jenni Murray, presented Clinton as a beacon of female achievement. She did not remind her listeners about Clinton’s profanity that Afghanistan was invaded to “liberate” women like Orifa. She asked  Clinton nothing about her administration’s terror campaign using drones to kill women, men and children. There was no mention of Clinton’s idle threat, while campaigning to be the first female president, to “eliminate” Iran, and nothing about her support for illegal mass surveillance and the pursuit of whistle-blowers.
Murray did ask one finger-to-the-lips question. Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with husband? “Forgiveness is a choice,” said Clinton, “for me, it was absolutely the right choice.” This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky “scandal”. President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children; Unicef reported the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five as a result of an embargo led by the US and Britain.
The children were media unpeople, just as Hillary Clinton’s victims in the invasions she supported and promoted – Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia — are media unpeople. Murray made no reference to them. A photograph of her and her distinguished guest, beaming, appears on the BBC website.
In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britain’s Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron’s celebrated reports of the explosion of the Hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today’s grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal.
In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill wrote: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required.  “It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature: its conviction that it represents a superior form of life.” He had in mind a speech by Blair in which the then prime minister promised to “reorder the world around us” according to his “moral values”.
Richard Falk, the respected authority on international law and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, once described a “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”. It is “so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable”.
Tenure and patronage reward the guardians. On BBC Radio 4, Razia Iqbal interviewed Toni Morrison, the African-American Nobel Laureate. Morrison wondered why people were “so angry” with Barack Obama, who was “cool” and wished to build a “strong economy and health care”. Morrison was proud to have talked on the phone with her hero, who had read one of her books and invited her to his inauguration.
Neither she nor her interviewer mentioned Obama’s seven wars, including his terror campaign by drone, in which whole families, their rescuers and mourners have been murdered. What seemed to matter was that a “finely spoken” man of colour had risen to the commanding heights of power. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that the “historic mission” of the colonized was to serve as a “transmission line” to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of ethnic difference in western power and propaganda systems is now seen as essential. Obama epitomizes this, though the cabinet of George W. Bush – his warmongering clique – was the most multiracial in presidential history.
As the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the jihadists of ISIS, Obama said, “The American people made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give Iraqis the opportunity to chart a better destiny.” How “cool” is that lie? How “finely spoken” was Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on 28 May. Delivering his “state of the world” address at the graduation ceremony of those who “will take American leadership” across the world, Obama said, “The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it. International opinion matters, but America will never ask permission …”
In repudiating international law and the rights of independent nations, the American president claims a divinity based on the might of his “indispensable nation”. It is a familiar message of imperial impunity, though always bracing to hear. Evoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being.”  Historian Norman Pollack wrote: “For goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”
In February, the US mounted one of its “color” coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obama’s national security adviser Victoria Nuland personally selected the leader of an “interim government”. She nicknamed him “Yats”. Vice President Joe Biden came to Kiev, as did CIA Director John Brennan. The shock troops of their putsch were Ukrainian fascists.
For the first time since 1945, a neo-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital.  No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism in the borderland through which Hitler’s invading Nazis took millions of Russian lives. They were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Jews and Russians they called “vermin”. The UPA is the historical inspiration of the present-day Svoboda Party and its fellow-travelling Right Sector. Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Nato’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War.
A Nato Membership Action Plan is Washington’s gift to the coup-regime in Kiev. In August, “Operation Rapid Trident” will put American and British troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and “Sea Breeze” will send US warships within sight of Russian ports. Imagine the response if these acts of provocation, or intimidation, were carried out on America’s borders.
In reclaiming Crimea — which Nikita Kruschev illegally detached from Russia in 1954 – the Russians defended themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90 per cent of the population of Crimea voted to return the territory to Russia. Crimea is the home of the Black Sea Fleet and its loss would mean life or death for the Russian Navy and a prize for Nato. Confounding the war parties in Washington and Kiev, Vladimir Putin withdrew troops from the Ukrainian border and urged ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon separatism.
In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the west to the “Russian threat”. Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler. Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitised as “nationalists” or “ultra nationalists”. What they fear is that Putin is skilfully seeking a diplomatic solution, and may succeed. On 27 June, responding to Putin’s latest accommodation – his request to the Russian Parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power to intervene on behalf of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians – Secretary of State John Kerry issued another of his ultimatums. Russia must “act within the next few hours, literally” to end the revolt in eastern Ukraine. Notwithstanding that Kerry is widely recognised as a buffoon, the serious purpose of these “warnings” is to confer pariah status on Russia and suppress news of the Kiev regime’s war on its own people.
A third of the population of Ukraine are Russian-speaking and bilingual. They have long sought a democratic federation that reflects Ukraine’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland. Separatism is a reaction to the Kiev junta’s attacks on them, causing as many as 110,000 (UN estimate) to flee across the border into Russia. Typically, they are traumatized women and children.
Like Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women and girls, terrorized by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine are media unpeople in the west, their suffering and the atrocities committed against them minimized, or suppressed. No sense of the scale of the regime’s assault is reported in the mainstream western media. This is not unprecedented. Reading again Phillip Knightley’s masterly The First Casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist and mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for theManchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price, the only western reporter to remain in Russia during the 1917 revolution and report the truth of a disastrous invasion by the western allies. Fair-minded and courageous, Philips Price alone disturbed what Knightley calls an anti-Russian “dark silence” in the west.
On 2 May, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. There is horrifying video evidence.  The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). The New York Times buried it, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.
On 28 June, the Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regime’s “president”, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko.  Again, Orwell’s rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no war against Ukraine’s minority; the Russians were to blame for everything. “We want to modernize my country,” said Poroshenko. “We want to introduce freedom, democracy and European values. Somebody doesn’t like that. Somebody doesn’t like us for that.”
According to his report, the Guardian’s reporter, Luke Harding, did not challenge these assertions, or mention the Odessa atrocity, the regime’s air and artillery attacks on residential areas, the killing and kidnapping of journalists, the firebombing of an opposition newspaper and his threat to “free Ukraine from dirt and parasites”. The enemy are “rebels”, “militants”, “insurgents”, “terrorists” and stooges of the Kremlin. Summon from history the ghosts of Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, southern Africa, Iraq; note the same tags. Palestine is the lodestone of this unchanging deceit. On 11 July, following the latest Israeli, American equipped slaughter in Gaza – 80 people including six children in one family — an Israeli general writes in the Guardian under the headline, “A necessary show of force”.
In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.”
John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the U.K. and the U.S. Pilger’s new film, "Utopia," about Australia, was released in Australia in January. www.johnpilger.com

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Cranky John McCain stumbles in confused bluster

Rachel Maddow shares video of Senator John McCain complaining about not being able to bring a cell phone into immigration detention facilities while confusing the names of the officials at whom he is ranting.

Monday, July 7, 2014

A Newspaper Actually Used a Headline Calling Obama The N-Word In The White House

A New York newspaper is under fire for running a headline that called President Barack Obama the nigger in the White House.

By Jason Easley

 














A New York newspaper is under fire for running a headline that called President Barack Obama the nigger in the White House.

According to The Wrap, “The WestView News, a small paper that touts itself as “The Voice of the West Village,” ran an op-ed column in its July edition titled “The Nigger in the White House.” The article, penned by James Lincoln Collier, was actually pro-Obama and criticized what it called “racism” by far-right voters.”

It is never okay to use the n-word in a headline. It doesn’t matter if the article is pro or anti-Obama. It is disrespectful to the President Of The United States as a man and disrespectful to the office that he has been elected twice to hold. It was not in any way an appropriate headline. In fact, it is headlines such as this that give the people who hate Obama because of the color of his skin something to point to when they get called out for their bigotry.

PoliticusUSA has, unfortunately, had to spend loads of column space pointing out and criticizing the race-based hatred and behavior of some conservatives. Headlines that go for shock value such as the one that The WestView News used is a discredit to journalism and the journalistic community.

President Obama has had to deal with race-based opposition to his presidency since before he was elected to his first term. Republicans have calculatingly used race as a political tool to divide the country. Republicans have championed conservatives who questioned the president’s nation of birth, the validity of his birth certificate, and even his college transcripts. The constant drumbeat of race-based hatred of this president has been a consistent theme of his presidency.

The last thing that the millions of Americans who are working hard combating the conservative attempts to exploit the nation’s ugly underbelly of racism and discrimination needed was a headline calling the president an n-word. By even using the headline, The WestView News perpetuated the racism that the article’s author opposes.

Supporters of a colorblind society should be saddened and outraged by this headline. I would like to think that supporters of the president are smarter than those who were involved with the creation and publication of this headline. Partisan anger brings out the worst in people, but defending the president by perpetuating racism is not the way to build a better society.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

16 Epic Jon Stewart Insults Worthy of Shakespeare

By Janet Allon


Jon Stewart takes a week off every once in a while and we are consigned to watching his reruns for a fix, which is okay because they stand up fairly well. It also gives us a chance to take a step back and savor some of his finest insults. Stewart might have torn a page or two from Shakespeare’s book—the bard was known to sling a good insult here and there.

When Hamlet says, “They have a plentiful lack of wit,” and a character in Coriolanus says, “More of your conversation would infect my brain,” they could certainly be talking about Fox News. 

Henry V’s line: “Such antics do not amount to a man,” could certainly apply to John Boehner or Ted Cruz, and “Thou mis-shapen dick,” seems tailor-made for Scalia, Alito and Limbaugh. Take your pick.

But Stewart has his own way with words (or he and his scribes do.) Too bad he took Hobby Lobby week off, but let’s take a moment to remember some of his best digs, some of which sound positively Shakespearean.

1. Sonnet to Rush Limbaugh:
“ Rush—The quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund cleanup site that was his soul.”

2. Insult by metaphor:
''Fox News: You are the lupus of news.''

3. Ode to O’Reilly
''Here's what you and your minions don't understand, O'Reilly. Your hell doesn't scare me. I make my living watching Fox News eight hours a day. I'm already in hell.''

4. Soliloquy on Fox:
''Fox opposes a Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic, to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust, and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic succubus-like existence.”

5. And in the role of the fool:
''Rick Perry is what happens if Lex Luthor distilled down George Bush essence in a laboratory and crossed it with gun powder and semen from the finest thoroughbred in Lubbock, and then strapped that concoction onto a nuclear missile and shot it into the f**king sun! And then, waited, waited, waited, until one day, on the anniversarry of the Alamo, a solar flare, yada yada yada, Rick Perry!''

6. The king in his lonely tower:
''Mitt Romney calling the President 'detached and out of touch' is like a multimillionaire who owns two mansions, six cars, and who thinks 'corporations are people, my friend' calling someone 'detached and out of touch.'''

7. Michele Bachmann, one of the witches in MacBeth?
''Be honest Newsweek, you used that photo in a petty attempt to make Michele Bachmann look crazy. That's what her words are for.''

8. Wait, no, Bachmann’s not nearly clever enough to be a witch
''I gotta say, of all my issues with Michele Bachmann's brain, migraines are not even in the top 20.''

9. My kingdom for a horse?
''These are troubled times, and we need a hero, someone unencumbered by politics as usual. Someone who could kill a moose with one hand and skin a bear with the other. Someone without a job. ... Yes! Like a ship slowly appearing over the horizon to an island of castaways, Sarah Palin has arrived with fresh food, clothing and that little box she keeps next to her bed filled with crazy.''

10. Falstaffian excess?
''Either he's getting ready to play an Indian in a 1950s Western, or John Boehner is not human, but actually made entirely of cured meats.'

11. How the mighty have fallen
''Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, once two of the most powerful men in this country, are now suffering from Balzheimer's disease. Why didn't I see it before? Balzheimer's is a terrible illness that attacks the memory and gives its victims the balls to attack others for things they themselves made a career of. There is no known cure.''

12. A rose by any other name would smell?
''Republicans are no longer allowed to say that people are rich. You have to refer to them as 'job creator'. You can't even use the word 'rich'. You have to say, 'This chocolate cake is so moist and job creator.'''

13. The green-eyed monster doth mock:
''Must be nice to be a Republican senator sometimes, because you get the fun of breaking sh*t and the joy of complaining the sh*t you just broke doesn't work.''

14. All’s well that . . . wait . . .
''I view America like this: 70 to 80 percent [are] pretty reasonable people that truthfully, if they sat down, even on contentious issues, would get along. And the other 20 percent of the country run it. ''

15. O war! Thou son of hell!
''Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe -- dare I dream it? -- maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.''

16. If you prick us, do we not bleed?
''Why is it that if you take advantage of a tax break and you're a corporation, you're a smart businessman, but if you take advantage of something you need to not be hungry, you're a moocher?''

Maine's Gov. Paul LePage May Be Dumbest in Nation's History

By Brad Friedman

We've long regarded Maine's Republican Gov. Paul LePage as giving Arizona's Republican Gov. Jan Brewer a run for her money as the dumbest Governor in the nation, if not the dumbest in history.

But it appears that LePage has been making a real run for that latter title all along.

As early as 2011, we took notice just after LePage took office and immediately ordered the removal of a mural from the state's Dept. of Labor because it was too pro-uniony, or something. That and other "Tea Party"-ish behavior by the then new Governor resulted in a bunch of state Senators from his own party asking him, publicly, to tone it down a bit.

"Were these isolated incidents, we would bite our collective tongues," the Republican lawmakers wrote in an op-ed at the time. "But, unfortunately, they are not isolated but frequent. Therefore, we feel we must speak out."

But that was just a taste for what was to come and what's been revealed about him this week...

You may also recall late last year when we highlighted the brain trust that is LePage as he was actually celebrating the melting Arctic, on the premise that it opened up the Northern Passage as a shipping lane for Maine --- despite the fact that global warming, in addition to threatening the entirety of human civilization in the not too distant future, is already posing more immediate dangers to Maine's maple syrup and shrimping industries, among others.

"Everybody looks at the negative effects of global warming, but with the ice melting, the Northern Passage has opened up," LePage explained, according to the Bangor Daily News at the time. "So maybe, instead of being at the end of the pipeline, we're now at the beginning of a new pipeline."

But our biggest clue about the guy, who is now running for re-election, probably should have come after his April 2013 claim that a new wind turbine at a Maine university --- one that had produced some 680,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean electricity in its first year (saving the school about $100,000, not to mention the reduction of dangerous CO2 output) --- actually had "a little electric motor that turns the blades."

"I’m serious," the Governor insisted during his remarks to the Skowhegan Area Chamber of Commerce that month. "They have an electric motor so they can show people that wind power works.

Unbelievable."

Well, now we may have an explanation --- of sorts --- for LePage's storied idiocy...or, at least his proud public display of same. According to the first chapter of journalist Mike Tipping's forthcoming book, As Maine Went: Governor Paul LePage and the Tea Party Takeover of Maine, until his own staff finally had to step in to put a stop to it, LePage had been meeting about once a month --- reportedly for several hours each time --- with a group of Rightwing "Sovereign Citizen" extremists and taking great interest, and even action, on their remarkable theories, legal and conspiratorial and otherwise.

While the Governor, according to Tipping, "was later forced to recant his accusation" about the wind turbine, "after his remarks made national news...He did not reveal the source of the false conspiracy theory." Tipping does so. On that relatively innocent, if highly illustrative, windmill conspiracy and much more that is far less innocent.

You've got to read the amazing full chapter, as published at Talking Points Memo this week, to fully appreciate the madness in play here, particularly for a public official of LePage's high office. But this follow-up article, reported by the Portland Press Herald in response to the piece, proves to be a pretty good teaser for it:
 
[LePage's press secretary, Adrienne] Bennett did not address why LePage met with the group eight times, why a county sheriff was asked to look into their demands or why the governor's legal staff was asked to draft an opinion of the group's claims that Senate President Justin Alfond, D-Portland, and House Speaker Mark Eves, D-North Berwick, should be arrested and executed.

Yes. It's that insane and more so. Tipping's piece is a detailed and extraordinary read, but well worth bookmarking for the long holiday weekend along and a nice tall pitcher of lemonade iced tea.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Walmart’s Food Stamp Scam Explained in One Easy Chart

By Erica Smiley

140625-CWCE-food-stamps-POST
Walmart, the nation’s most profitable corporation, may also be the greatest beneficiary of the taxpayer-funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps.

But how has Walmart managed to make so much money off of taxpayers? For the short answer, take a look at the chart below where we’ve illustrated the scam. For the long answer, keep reading.
140624-CWCE_Food_Stamp_Scam_POST_CHART
Step One: Pay your employees so little that they are forced to rely on food stamps to survive.

Even at Walmart’s definition of a full-time job, an employee earning the company’s average wage of $8.81/hour makes just $15,500 per year, placing them well below the federal poverty line for a family of four. With such low wages, even when working full-time hours, many associates are forced to depend on taxpayer-funded assistance such as food stamps and Medicaid to survive. In other words, Walmart is shifting responsibility onto the public for ensuring their associates’ basic needs are met.

One study showed that a single Walmart can cost taxpayers anywhere from $904,542 to nearly $1.75 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee for these programs all because one of the world’s most profitable retailers is paying substandard wages and benefits. A more recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness revealed that Walmart’s reliance on programs like food stamps cost federal taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion a year.

Step Two: Exploit loopholes to avoid paying billions in taxes that fund food stamps.

While taxpayers are shouldering the responsibility to ensure Walmart’s employees can make ends meet, the company zealously avoids contributing its fair share of taxes using a myriad of schemes. Another report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies claims the company exploits a little-known loophole to avoid an estimated $104 million in U.S. taxes by granting extravagant “performance pay” bonuses to top executives. You read that right – the more Walmart pays its executives, the less it pays in taxes.

The Waltons, the nation’s wealthiest family and owners of Walmart, contribute almost none of their personal wealth to the charitable foundation that bears their name and instead uses the charity’s tax structure to avoid an estimated $3 billion per year in estate taxes.

By fervently minimizing its tax liability, Walmart has once again dodged its responsibility in addressing its employees’ basic needs and is instead letting the rest of us foot the bill.

Step Three: Reap billions in profits when food stamps are spent in your stores.

So what happens to all those food stamp dollars? They’re spent at Walmart!

Last year alone, Walmart collected an estimated $13 billion in revenue from food stamps spent in their stores. As Slate and NPR reported in April,
“The same company that brings in the most food stamp dollars in revenue – an estimated $13 billion last year – also likely has the most employees using food stamps.”
There you have it. Walmart’s perfected its food stamp scheme by keeping its employees dependent on taxpayer-funded food stamps, not paying its fair share in taxes to  fund SNAP, and then reaping all the profits from food stamp redemption in its stores.

For a company that can easily afford to pay its employees decent wages, Walmart has decided to do just the opposite. Just last week, the company’s spokesman, David Tovar, published a snarky retort in response to a recent New York Times opinion column denouncing the company’s refusal to meet its employees’ most basic needs. As the Huffington Post revealed, Tovar’s “fact check” was short on actual facts, but it did illustrate another of Walmart’s usual strategies: when problems are exposed within your ranks, unleash a well-funded PR machine instead of addressing the issue.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Rise of a right-wing quack: Faux-historian David Barton’s shocking new influence

David Barton - Glenn Beck's favorite "historian" - is a discredited fraud. Which makes his new ascent terrifying.

By


Rise of a right-wing quack: Faux-historian David Barton's shocking new influenceDavid Barton (Credit: AP/Harry Cabluck)

Back when Glenn Beck was one of the most admired men in America and Fox News’ No. 1 celebrity, he introduced to the nation at large a “historian,” well known among the Christian right, by the name of David Barton, who claims to have documentary evidence that the founders based the Constitution explicitly on the Bible.

Beck often referred to a group known as the “black-robed regiment,” which was composed of priests and clergy who were revolutionary sympathizers, comparing today’s conservative preachers to what he implied were clergymen-soldiers in the secular liberal war on the Constitution.

Beck called upon David Barton to head what he called Beck University, an online course for those who wanted to educate themselves in the Beck school of thought. Let’s just say it wasn’t the curriculum you’d find at most schools of higher learning.   (You can hear one of David Barton’s “lectures” here, where he tells the Beck U students that American exceptionalism springs from its Christian theocratic principles.)

Barton quickly became the toast of Wingnuttia. He was invited to participate in Tea Party events all over the country and even held a constitutional seminar for the 2010 incoming freshman class at the invitation of congresswoman Michele Bachmann.  The New York Times featured him in a glowing profile that only mentioned in passing that his alleged scholarship was, shall we say, controversial:
[M]any professional historians dismiss Mr. Barton, whose academic degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, as a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible.
“The problem with David Barton is that there’s a lot of truth in what he says,” said Derek H. Davis, director of church-state studies at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Tex. “But the end product is a lot of distortions, half-truths and twisted history.”


That’s a very generous way of putting it. Unfortunately, his notoriety also brought new scrutiny to his alleged scholarship and that didn’t work out too well as you might imagine. Here’s just one example of his so-called scholarship being debunked by Chris Rodda, the senior researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, via Media Matters. She challenged Barton’s insistence that Thomas Jefferson dated his presidential papers with the phrase “in the year of our Lord Christ,” which indicated that the notorious theist was really a super-Christian (what with the added “Christ” and all).
According to Rodda, the truth is quite different: Jefferson took pains to omit “in the year of our Lord” in his documents, instead using phrases like “in the Christian computation,” and “of the Christian epoch.” Further, according to Rodda, the evidence Barton provided of Jefferson purportedly using the phrase is, in fact, a preprinted form that Jefferson had no input into creating.
This is the quality of constitutional scholarship that pervades the conservative movement these days: simple, outright lies that allege that this country was not founded on certain Enlightenment principles and the hard won experience of men and women who were exceedingly familiar with the bloody consequences of church and state being entwined.  It was, in their reckoning, conceived as a straight-up Christian nation, full stop.

But the good news in all this is that such craziness of the Tea Party fire is pretty much burned out and we don’t have to worry too much about this crazy stuff, right? After all, today they’re just a group of libertarian isolationists who want to work with the left to take our country back from the wealthy elites.  (And, who knows, maybe there really are a few like that out there.) But the makeup of the Tea Party remains the same as it ever was; it is simply the latest iteration of the far right.  And as religious right observer Sarah Posner adroitly observed:
[T]o understand why the Tea Party resonates with the religious right and vice versa, one must understand how the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement is driven by a fundamental tenet of Christian reconstructionism: that there are certain God-ordained spheres – family, church and government – and that government has exceeded the authority God gave it, to the detriment of church, family and the individual, whose rights, both Tea Partiers and religious right-ists maintain, are granted by God, not the government.
This notion that the federal government – not only godless, but in flagrant violation of God’s will – is “tyrannical” and needs to be overthrown resonates from militias to the John Birch Society to the podiums of religious-right gatherings where Republican presidential hopefuls jockey for the support of the faithful. To fail to see the religious roots of the Tea Party mantra – or the ways in which it reverberates as a divine imperative – is to blind oneself to a fundamental feature of American conservatism.
If you would like to see how this is being expressed in our current election cycle, look no further than this fine fellow, the Tea Party-endorsed talk radio host  Jody Hice, who is running for Congress in Georgia’s 10th District. Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal Constitution tells us:
“Although Islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology,” Hice wrote in his 2012 book. “It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection.
And as Ed Kilgore points out, he’s not the only one down there in Georgia running on a Christian right platform. In the 11th District, Barry Loudermilk is in a runoff with former impeachment manager Bob Barr (who also happens to be an actual, real live libertarian) and he’ a true believer too:
Loudermilk is an eager member of the Glenn Beck wing of the GOP. He is also an apostle of faux historian David Barton, who preaches that the U.S. Constitution is a document intended to create a conservative Christian government. Like Hice, they reject the notion of a separation between Christianity and state, and argue that the First Amendment was intended only to keep government from favoring one particular Christian denomination.
And just in case anyone has doubts about how fringey these ideas really are, the words of a potential GOP 2016 presidential candidate ought to bring you up short:
“I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced–forced at gunpoint no less–to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.”  – Mike Huckabee
Back in 2012 Barton’s book “The Jefferson Papers” was finally challenged by Christian conservative scholars and his so-called credibility took a hit. But he wasn’t down for long. He came back with presentations to state legislators in Kansas and Missouri and appeared at major Right to Life gatherings. Soon he was seen huddling in prayer with perhaps his most important connection, Sen. Ted Cruz:
“I’m not in a position to opine on academic disputes between historians, but I can tell you that David Barton is a good man, a courageous leader and a friend,” Cruz told POLITICO. “David’s historical research has helped millions rediscover the founding principles of our nation and the incredible sacrifices that men and women of faith made to bequeath to us the freest and most prosperous nation in the world.”
They aren’t done yet.
Right Wing Watch has published  a thorough dossier on Barton if you’d like to read further.
Heather Digby Parton Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

John Boehner won’t answer his favorite question

Speaker John Boehner's law suit against the president distracts from finding an answer to his favorite question, where are the jobs? Ed Schultz, Sen. Sherrod Brown and United Steel Workers President Leo Gerard discuss.

Maybe We Should Listen to Bill Kristol on Iraq

By Tom Tomorrow

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

LeBron James Opts Out of Contract With Miami Heat, Becoming Free Agent

http://espn.go.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/story/_/id/11127329/lebron-james-opt-contract-miami-heat

Jon Stewart mocks ‘America’s Tragedy Herpe’ Dick Cheney and his ‘Sith apprentice’ daughter

By Tom Boggioni

stewartcheneygrab
 
With the rise of insurgent terrorist group ISIS in Iraq, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart mocked the reemergence of former Vice President Dick Cheney, calling him ‘America’s Tragedy Herpe’ returning to give advice on how to handle the troubled country.

Opening with Star Wars ‘Imperial March’ theme, a resigned Stewart said, “There is America’s tragedy herpe, Dick Cheney…. Alright, Dick Cheney, tell us how we have done everything wrong since you left office and, if you would, do it from in front of a Sears portrait studio backdrop, whilst your Sith apprentice stands in an eerie silent vigil, go…”

Stewart then showed a clip of a stiff Dick Cheney standing in front of a field, wearing a cowboy hat, and reading from a teleprompter while explaining that the Middle East was following apart under the Obama Administration.

Mocking Cheney, Stewart added, “My point is, if you send federal revenuers up here, we will defend our land.”

Wondering if “America has tired of Dick Cheney’s blame game,” Stewart showed a clip of Cheney’s appearance on Megyn Kelly’s show where the Fox host told the former vice president, “history ‘has proven you got it wrong.”

A smiling Stewart said maybe now Cheney will understand how it feels when “someone you thought was a friend shoots you in the face.”

Watch the video below from Comedy Central:

Monday, June 23, 2014

The best video game trailers of all time

 
Valiant Heart trailer
The video game industry has grown enough over the past 30 years that it has developed a key trait that earlier generations of games initially lacked: taste. Games have always been able to convey complex stories, but something needs to let people know that in order for them to make the purchase. Obviously, trailers are a way to capture people’s attention. Sometimes, though, developers go so far above and beyond creating that mini-commercial for their game that they ultimately create a tasteful, self-contained narrative all on its own that’s able to be delivered in just a couple of minutes. Many trailers are good, but only a select few can survive on their own as a separate piece of flash video fiction, and these are the best out there.
 

Valiant Hearts

Warning: the above trailer for UbiArt’s upcoming game is nearing the depression level of the infamous Futurama dog episode. You know the one. Aside from being instilled with the power to put tears in the eyes of the most hardened, bitter soul, the narrative not only conveys what the game is about, but you can show it to your grandma and she won’t feel lost. The trailer works on its own, regardless of its video game roots.
 

Dead Island

When the Dead Island trailer dropped a handful of years ago, for a brief moment, it engulfed the internet. From Twitter feeds to Facebook posts, and gaming outlets to sites that have nothing to do with media, the digitally connected world was interrupted. Once you saw the trailer, it made sense — it’s simply one of the best trailers from any genre of media. Thanks to its clever use of editing the chronological flow of time and mixing that with a tragic, self-contained tale, people still talk about this trailer today — even though the game ended up having no emotional value relative to the trailer’s.
 

Halo 3

The final installment in the original Halo trilogy, Halo 3 not only picked up where the previous game’s very controversial cliffhanger left off, but — at the time — was viewed as the last “real” Halo game. Three more were made after that, and Microsoft has already unveiled Halo 5. Though the series has enjoyed some stellar trailers and commercials over the years, nothing comes close to the famous “Believe” trailer. It features an intense battlefield scene, but everything is still as a camera pans and zooms through the paused action. On its own, it tells the story and havoc of war — it doesn’t matter that you don’t necessarily know who the armor-clad soldiers are or why they’re battling aliens. The meticulous, tragic detail speaks volumes on its own.
 

Dying Light

Debuted last year, the same producer behind Dead Island — and thus its magnificent trailer seen above — is developing another zombie apocalypse game, Dying Light. Where Dead Island was more or less an open-world action title, Dying Light seems to be an open-world parkour title — but with zombies. The trailer, as seems to be the trend when Techland is involved, is great, and can stand as a self-contained short about the tragic story of a group of agile zombie apocalypse survivors, and the hell they have to go through just to survive.
 
 

Battleblock Theater

Once upon a time, there was a trailer about two guys who were the best of friends and going on an adventure. It release back in 2011, and had so many trailers between that and its 2013 release date, that it was actually a bit difficult to find this original version. While most memorable game trailers are serious affairs, Battleblock Theater’s is one of the funniest, from its unique narration style to the mimicry of wooden stick puppets. Whereas many trailers have been funny, this trailer is not only hilarious, but tells its own story, albeit a prologue. When your mom can enjoy a trailer about a game she knows nothing about, you know something went right.

The above trailers aren’t the only memorable game trailers – Metal Gear Solid trailers are always long and amusing, and one time Kratos was murdering enemies in a forest map that turned out to be the back of an enormous Titan climbing up mount Olympus. However, they’re perhaps the best instances of game trailers that can stand on their own. They have a proper beginning, middle, and end, and aren’t primarily focused on showing off how you’ll level up in a game, but instead effectively convey their games’ narratives by telling their own.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

They Belong in Prison, Not on Television




From left: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Secretary of State Condleeza Rice,
former vice president Dick Cheney attend the opening ceremony of the George W. Bush
Presidential Library, April 25, 2013. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)


They Belong in Prison, Not on Television
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Friday 20 June 2014

I wrote my first article on the folly of an Iraq invasion in August of 2002. There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I argued. There are no 9/11 connections in Iraq. There is no al Qaeda presence in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein was notorious for hanging Wahabbists from the nearest available light pole. An invasion would tear the country apart, explode sectarian tensions, and plunge the region into chaos.

Neither I nor the world knew at that time that George W. Bush and Tony Blair had decided four months earlier that the deal was going down no matter what. Neither I nor the world knew at that time that a decision had been made one month earlier to ensure that "intelligence and facts" would be "fixed around the policy" of invasion. I stayed on the no-invasion beat for the next seven months, writing dozens of articles and a book, as the world watched millions of people take to the streets in an attempt to stop something that was, as it turns out, inevitable.

Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Condolleeza Rice, and of course, George W. Bush, piled the sandbags high and deep around a decision that had already been made. We know they have these weapons, we know where they are, we don't want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud, plastic sheeting and duct tape, 9/11. Save for 23 bold souls, a craven Senate caved to the pressure and delivered the Iraq War Resolution to the Bush administration, and in late March of 2003, the skies over Baghdad glowed orange as the city was turned into a bowl of molten fire.

As the WMD argument fell to ashes, I kept writing. As the 9/11-connection argument collapsed, I kept writing...and then, first in a trickle and then a flood, people started writing me. Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters of American soldiers who had died in Iraq wrote me letter after letter, email after email, demanding answers. Why? Why did this happen? Why did my loved one die over there?

Never mind the fact that I and so very many others spent so much time and energy for so many years trying to stop all this from happening. Never mind the fact that the perpetrators of this enormous fraud, this smash-and-grab robbery, this looting of the Treasury, this act of first-degree murder on a massive scale, all walked away scot-free to pursue new careers and live lives of comfort. Amazingly enough, that's not the worst part.

The worst part is that they're all on my television again, trying to blame President Obama for the circumstances created by their own feckless, murderous decisions.

Tony Blair: "We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't."

Paul Wolfowitz: "Look, it's a complicated situation in which you don't just come up with, 'We're going to bomb this, we're going to do that.'"

Doug Feith: "This is the education of Barack Obama, but it's coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people to the American national interest."

John McCain: "What about the fact that General Petraeus had the conflict won thanks to the Surge and if we had left a residual force behind that we could have - we could, we would not be facing the crisis we are today."

Karl Rove, when asked about the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq: "Yeah, that's an old argument that we waste time on."

Dick Cheney: "He (Obama) abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory."

Let me put it plainly: these people do not belong on my television. They belong in prison, for the crimes of theft, torture and murder. They shattered the lives of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Iraqi civilians. They savaged the American economy paying for it all, and several of them got very rich in the process. They should be in orange jumpsuits and fetters, picking mealworms out of their gruel while shuttered in very small, very grim, very inescapable metal rooms.

I spent the first decade of the 21st century dealing with these blood-sodden bastards. Now, it appears, I will spend a chunk of a second decade watching them run around trying desperately to wash that blood from their hands...and the "news" media, also thoroughly culpable in this ongoing debacle, is all too happy to help them do it.

That, too, should be a crime.

The whole thing: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24490-william-rivers-pitt-they-belong-in-prison-not-on-tv

Friday, June 20, 2014

Scott Walker under investigation

Prosecutors in Wisconsin allege that Governor Scott Walker personally oversaw illegal coordinated fundraising among conservative groups. Lena Taylor and Ruth Conniff join Ed Schultz to discuss.



Thursday, June 19, 2014

Father and Daughter Cheney Can Go Suck a Dick

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The only words that I want to hear coming out of Dick Cheney's mouth are an apology

Yesterday, Dick Cheney wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that blamed President Obama for the current crisis in Iraq. Tonight, Ed will explain to the former Vice President why he’s wrong with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Il., and democratic strategist Bob Shrum.

HEY, DICK CHENEY!